Where they’re heading

Perhaps to the fulfillment of the five-year plan that was laid out by owner Mikhail Prokhorov when he bought the team four years ago—he wanted an NBA champion after five years, he said. He might have one. Of course, to get that, he had to bring in a pair of tested veterans, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce (along with Jason Terry), in a trade with the Celtics over the summer, also adding versatile forward Andrei Kirilenko as a free agent to come off the bench. To do so, the Nets ran their payroll to $101 million, which means they will have a luxury tax bill of $82 million, but when you’ve got Prokhorov’s money, that’s not a big deal.

Of course, as we have seen repeatedly in the NBA, big salaries don’t necessarily mean championships, and the Nets will have challenges, starting with rookie head coach Jason Kidd and the leftover backcourt of Deron Williams and Joe Johnson, underachieving former All-Stars who must sort out how the new-look Nets are going to work.

Where they’ve been

To understand why the Nets went on the shopping spree this summer, you have to understand just how disappointing this bunch was last year. The franchise finally made its move to Brooklyn, which gave quite a jolt to the NBA, but failed to jolt the players on the roster and coach Avery Johnson paid the price, fired early in the year and replaced by P.J. Carlesimo.

The biggest offenders was the trio of Williams, Johnson and Gerald Wallace, who showed little passion as the team established itself as decent but ordinary. The nonchalance of the Nets was exposed in the playoffs by a gritty Bulls team, playing without Derrick Rose, with a banged-up Joakim Noah and with Luol Deng out for most of the series. Yet Brooklyn still lost the series, bounced from the first round of the playoffs thanks to a Game 7 loss on their home floor. It was a stunning turn of events, and inspired first the hiring of Kidd as coach, then the trade for Garnett and Pierce.

Introducing … Andrei Kirilenko

Kirilenko is the X-factor in this group. Yes, there were plenty of front office execs around the NBA who were not pleased that the Nets signed him on a bargain deal after he opted out of $10 million for the season with the Timberwolves. But no foul play was found, and he is the rest of the East’s problem now. Kirilenko is 32 and has had trouble staying healthy—he missed 18 games last year—but he is still a smart, rangy defender who can shut down stars without needing double-team help.

In the Eastern Conference, being able to deploy that kind of weapon off the bench is huge, because the Nets’ top fellow contenders all have a perimeter star who is the key to the offense: Derrick Rose in Chicago, Paul George in Indiana, Carmelo Anthony in New York and LeBron James in Miami. Not that Kirilenko can singlehandedly shut down any of those guys, but he gives Kidd a credible additional option when it comes to defending them.

Numbers game

Of all the things that didn’t work out so well in Brooklyn last year, the thing that clearly was effective was running the offense through Brook Lopez, the best offensive center in the game. There were only seven centers in the league that had 1,000 offensive possessions, according to Synergy Sports, and Lopez was easily the most efficient, averaging 1.031 points per possession. No. 2 on the list was Marc Gasol, who was at 0.968 points per possession, followed by Dwight Howard (0.949), Nikola Vucevic (0.928), Greg Monroe (0.891), DeMarcus Cousins (0.883) and Roy Hibbert (0.836).